What a Good Employee Onboarding Looks Like

The first few days at my first job out of college at a big company, was, to no surprise, a tedious checklist of forms to fill out and compliance-based sessions. AKA, welcome to the company, here’s how not to get fired,

I’ve learned that how you onboard employees makes a huge impact – similar to onboarding a new user to your product. To no surprise, our earliest employees were given a desk, a computer hastily overnighted from Amazon, and a general idea of what they were to do. We continued to iterate and improve on that, and in the past year or two that I’ve given away that lego, it’s improved even more. I’m thankful that our new hires give us feedback that this is the smoothest/best new hire experience they’ve gone through, so I figured I would share our rough formula.

Before day 1

Get all the paperwork out of the way. In a paperless world, why wait? They get access to all appropriate forms well before, and of course can ask questions. We also can ask other useful details, like if they want a standing desk and any allergies.

In addition to their hiring manager, team lead, and our operations team, they also are introduced to their mentor, a more tenured employee who can serve as an informal aide to help get them acclimated.

They get access to all accounts too.

First two weeks

General introduction to the company, basic tools, and mission/values (I’m still allowed to do this).

Systems/Office Tour/HR Details

Product training

Use case training (who uses Contactually, and why?)

Why Contactually (two parts – why does Contactually exist, and why do you work here?)

Company history

Introductions/sit-downs with various departments

Product exam

Various check-ins

In general

Each team has their own additional onboarding, done in concert with the general company onboarding. These are usually pretty prescriptive – new engineers run through a detailed to-do list on the wiki that includes everything to set up the codebase and understand how to use it.

We always expect a ramp, but we generally believe in throwing people in the deep end.

We don’t make new team members wear propeller beanies, but we make sure to introduce them to the whole company, and existing employees go out of their way to introduce (and re-introduce) themselves.

A few weeks after every new hire starts, we meet with them 1:1 to understand what we could have done better, and make tweaks as appropriate.